STRAWBERRY COBBLER

Recipe for fruit cobbler:

Start 375 degree oven.

Combine 2 cups berries,  1/4 cup flour, 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar.

Combine (in another bowl) 1 1/2 cup flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar.

(Vary sugar according to sweetness of fruit or personal taste. For strawberries or blueberries I use less sugar, for blackberries more.)

In 2 cup measure, whisk together 3/4 cup milk and 1/4 cup vegetable oil. (I roll the whisk back and forth rapidly between my palms.)  Combine with flour mixture to make batter.

In greased baking dish place half of fruit mixture, then dribble or drop half of the batter on, and spread it if possible, to roughly cover the fruit.  Repeat with remaining fruit and batter.  This ensures that you don't just have a bottom layer of fruit and a dry layer of cake on top.  I sprinkled a little sugar on the top of this to make a kind of crunchy glaze.

Bake 35 to 40 minutes.

BRYCE 2011

Bryce is the only 3DCG art program I have ever been able to use because its interface is rightbrained.  It's possible to do amazingly complex and realistic scenes and landscapes with it, but naturally I ended up trying to do the opposite.  Here are a few examples of a minimalist series I did in August of last year.

SPIRAL STAIRCASE

BOLKAN

Brazilian-born Florinda Bolkan 

in Anonimo Veneziano (1970)

LANCHESTER

Elsa Lanchester in the psychological thriller

Ladies in Retirement (1941)

THE MAIN THING I REMEMBER

The main thing I remember from the last two Star Wars movies is this:

 Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones 

Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith

OIL RIG

WHISPERS IN THE DARK

Connee Boswell's puzzling performance in 1937's Artists and Models

ROOM 38

POLICE

Riot police in the Congo, from a photo by John Bompengo

ONE PICTURE PER HOUR

Five pictures in five hours, sourced from the 1969 yearbook of Notre Dame girls' high school in Quincy Illinois.

THE CURSE OF I. STANFORD JOLLEY

For part of my evening's edutainment I chose a poverty row crime comedy from the 1940s and a cavemen and dinosaurs move from the 1960s.  What are the odds that I. Stanford Jolley would be in both? 100%.  Here he is (on the right) in Shake Hands With Murder (1944), a Producers Releasing Corporation cheapie which gave a rare starring role to brassy character Iris Adrian: 

Here he is in Valley of the Dragons (1961), a weird conversion of Verne's Off on a Comet into a formulaic caveman movie which re-uses the same giant lizard and cataclysm footage as a dozen others of its ilk:

Who the hell is I. Stanford Jolley anyway?  I don't know.  It was his initialized name and his sorrowful eyebrows (hardly conducive or representative of jollity) which attracted my attention a few years ago and now he pops up every once in a while as a rainsoaked desperate character, a family court judge, the leader of  a criminal gang, a businessman, a caveman.  The Curse of I. Stanford Jolley is that there is no Curse of  I. Stanford Jolley.  That is all I can tell you about I. Stanford Jolley.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY

MOVIES - Teaching Myself Another Lesson

One of the most important things I have learned in my life is that things which provoke powerful emotional responses are important and should be carefully examined.  Dickens, Shakespeare and Aeschylus were part of  the popular entertainment media of their day, just as current movies and television shows are part of the popular media of ours.  I do not doubt that in Dickens' times there were those who hunkered down over their Greek Classics muttering imprecations against the cheap magazine serials that were degrading the weak minds of the populace.  Some works of today's popular media will join the classics in immortality but most will fade into oblivion like the majority of the works of the past.  Understanding their place in literature and history is why I watched the last two Star Wars movies and Twilight this week.

I saw the first Star Wars movie in the theater when it came out and it was the brainless space opera spectacular I had always wanted to see.  I thought it was great, and then I was done with it.  All the Star Wars ripoffs that followed were a real delight to me, but I had little interest in the actual Star Wars movies.  I have looked at the toys, read a collected volume of the comics, and at last have seen all the movies, all in an effort to understand its place in our culture and in our future history.  The first movie was like a bright loose watercolor sketch in strong colors that jumped out at me with its surprising energy.  As the years passed that sketch was worked up into ever more vast canvases in which every square centimeter is uniformly detailed and every pebble and blade of grass is given the same value as the main figures - making the image uniformly flat and lifeless.  Picking out the salient detail, the important part of the scene, becomes a chore not worth undertaking.  I think what Star Wars does provide, its cultural strength, is a framework - it gives its fans a lego set to play with, to build their own story.  The picture on the box is a guide but the fun lies in building some crazy unwieldy thing of your own and zooming it around making swooshing noises.  It's hard to see how it will be viewed a century from now but what is certain is that Star Wars is a triumph of marketing, not of literature.

An effective fantasy takes simple and common human experience and extends it, personifies it, magnifies it into an epic.  Twilight expands the idea of  First Love into a torrential storm and life-threatening disaster.  While I doubt I will ever have the strength to see more than the first movie or read the books I felt it was important to know just what the attraction is.  Twilight is a well-made movie, with strong visual appeal.  The dialog and characters are consistent and believable in their slightly unreal world and, while I never choked up or had to wipe away a tear, I felt it was very effective in conveying its ideas.  It doesn't really get any more complicated than being an expansion of the fears and anticipations of  being a teenager with adulthood looming on the horizon - learning things about life which are rather frightening and which really do have the power to ruin your life if you don't figure out how to deal with them.  The secondary details of environment and other characters gave a grounding to the fantastic elements, and it effectively conveyed the feeling of moving into an unknown world while those around you are living in an ever-receding normalcy.  Twilight's strength is in its simplicity, and its comprehensible depiction of a common emotional experience.  Its survival as literature seems to me unlikely, but it is an important component of our culture now.

ATTACK THE BLOCK

I got so involved in this I forgot to drink my coffee.

CAMERA LUCIDA

I got a bee in my bonnet about Cameras Lucidae and Obscurae this morning.  They are simple devices used to transfer images to a drawing surface. The ad above is the most widely known variety of Camera Lucida, a cheap and flimsy model which I saw once in a thrift store and decided it was too crappy to waste half a buck on.  It is a pretty fanciful depiction, as the posture of the artist is considerably different from the peering through a hole that you must do to use it properly.  Also, it inverts the image so she would be drawing him upside down.  Using a diagram from this Free Obscura page, I built the device below out of scrap cardboard and glass in about an hour.  I had to cut a 3 x 4 inch piece of window glass, and stuck everything together with that little glue gun from the dollar store.

I thought a rectangular slit might be better than a hole so both eyes could be used.  This is what you see when you look down through the slit - an image of the window of my studio is superimposed over a piece of paper on the workbench.  

It would require an armature like the device in the ad to use properly, but I am wondering if it might instead be attached to the brim of a hat.  You would have to hold your head quite still for that to work though.  Well it is almost time for lunch.

ADDENDUM: Here is the Camera Lucida hat.  In proper use I would be looking straight down at a piece of paper. Not really functional, and the Camera Lucida itself is of marginal use at best.  I can't imagine going to the trouble of really using it.

ADVERTISING IS GOOD AND FUN

Every Tuesday morning someone comes by and throws a plastic bag of  Food-Day into our yard.  That is the weekly lifestyle/advertising supplement to our city's major newspaper. It consists of a few pages of newspaper containing recipes too complicated or unhealthy for me to want to cook, gardening tips which rarely have anything to do with getting edible radishes to grow, a few unfunny comics and a crossword puzzle my wife regards with disdain.  The part I like is the ads.  I usually ignore the ads for stores I never go to or don't even know where one is, but avidly search the pack of general product ads for the Stupidest Ad of  Them All.  Like this recent treasure:

 I thought the Black Football Grandma with Photoshopped-On Sombrero was going to be the worst ad of the day until I saw this. I don't know what a normal person would say to that but what I say is oh my god why would anyone want that crap in their house.  Little dog shaped boxes just big enough to put one or two tiny useless pieces of crap in.  Crap in crap.  A whole shelf full.  Then I look closely and see this:

 I don't know what a normal person would say to that either but what I say is oh my god that is not even a picture of the product, it is a picture of an actual dog all photoshopped up to make it look like a crappy useless miniature box.  And then I think about the person whose job it is to take a picture of a dog and make it look like a crappy useless miniature box that is being held open by fingers that look like they are picking up  one of those little paper discs from a paper punch if they still even have those, and which certainly do not look like they are opening a miniature dog box.  I think about that person putting those sparkle gleams on that collar and sticking that ball in there and wonder if they ever think about what they are doing the way I think about it.  It is not fake miniature dog boxes which are the stupidest ad this week, but Lizard Walker.

I thrust this at my wife and watched with delight as she tried to figure out what the hell this is an ad for.  I will tell you now this is an ad for paper cups.  A room full of people all agreed that this Lizard Walker was their best idea and it would really make people want to buy their paper cups.  It would lend a tone of daring eccentricity and strange competence to their paper cups.  I admit it's a good picture - the yellow-green-beige color scheme is beautiful.  She is really striding along there to keep up with her blatantly immobile iguanas, which are scrambling along at the ends of their taut pink leashes, without actually moving, and the leashes merely touch her perfect fashion model hand and magically vanish.  She is in control of her lizards and her life and she brings her own coffee in a stylish paper cup.  Make a note of it on your shopping list please - paper cups (lizard walking kind).

CATCHING UP

Here are a couple of pretty good pictures I did today.

Webcam - Neumayer Station, Antarctica, in color

 Always a favorite - goes with the cemetery picture I posted earlier.

OBSCENE GESTURE

The estate of Danny Kaye released a statement today apologizing for this shocking scene in 1944's Up in Arms. “The obscene gesture in the performance was completely inappropriate, very disappointing, and we apologize to our fans,” the statement said. Steps are being taken to recall all copies of the film and remove or alter the offensive footage.  Because seeing a finger is so horrible.

WEBCAM - VLISSINGEN, HOLLAND

LONELY PLACE

MOVIES - an exercise in self-education

I have disliked cantaloupe all my life but I keep trying it just to see if I will ever like it.  Last year I had some cantaloupe that I kind of liked.  Just because I don't really like something that doesn't mean I am done with it forever, and if it is something extremely popular or acclaimed I keep wondering what it was that I missed.  I decided this week to re-visit three very popular or highly acclaimed movies I didn't think much of when I saw them.

Some younger acquaintances were chattering about The Big Lebowski the other day and I figured I ought to give it another try to see what it is that makes people like it enough to repeat all the taglines and catchphrases at each other and even dress up as the characters at Lebowski conventions.  It's true, they really do that.  It was fairly amusing when I first saw it but except for one or two things it mostly just slid right off my brain and disappeared.  So I watched it again and Donna joined me because she felt about the same way.  She still feels the same way about it that I do. There are some good laughs, interesting characters and situations, the acting and direction is all good but after about an hour I said, "My god, how much more of this am I going to have to sit through?"  Good storytelling requires the creation of a satisfying dynamic emotional form which rewards the audience.  Coen bros movies often fail for me in that the story is buried under a lot of noise - the characters, dialog and incidents distract from the flow of events and when a big plot turn takes place it is overpowered by details and its effect is lost.  The Big Lebowski did not reward my second viewing and I am glad I don't have to see it again.  I believe most of its fans become attached to the characters and catch-phrases and they could watch half hour episodes of The Big Lebowski indefinitely and never tire of it.  As a movie, it is a sitcom.  Please continue to enjoy it!

In the mid-'70s my college-going acquaintances had the opportunity to see Casablanca and their rapturous raving was unceasing.  Oh you have to see it, it's so great. When it came around to the revival house as it did once a year I went to see it and it didn't do much for me.  I had been watching classic movies on TV for years at that point so I was no dilettante, and compared to Key Largo or To Have and Have Not, it seemed like a pretty weak outing for Bogart.  Seeing it again I feel the same.  I was not captivated by the characters or situations.  There was a frisson of the forbidden which I didn't appreciate at the time in their unknowingly adulterous affair, but on the whole it just didn't do it for me.  What did impress me immensely was the lighting.  Casablanca has some of the best lighting I have ever seen.  The set of Rick's Cafe is just a big barn with white walls and empty arches, but it is brought to life by the lighting and staging of deep shots with multiple layers of shadows and moving figures.

 Every surface in every shot is brought to life by dappled shadows and angled illumination, and the space is filled with an endless variety of  baroque lamps.

 The palm fronds cast upon the arch here is especially brilliant, and the spaces beyond are filled with detail and shadows.

The gambling room in the back is not such an exotic jungle and the surfaces are more detailed but they are brought out clearly by well-placed lighting.  The framing of that rectilinear corner within the curved arch is great.

I think Casablanca is a pretty good movie but I have seen a lot of movies I like a lot better.


My mom took me to see Gone With the Wind on a whim.  It was re-released to theatres around 1970 or so and we went past a theater in a nearby town where it was showing.  It probably didn't make it to the small town where we lived thirty miles away.  She asked me if I wanted to see it and I said okay.  I had been hearing about it of course as one of the great artifacts of our culture and we had a copy of the book in the house but I never gave it a try.  I was 13 or so and it was obviously over my head, but that was not an uncommon experience for me as I had been taken along to Spartacus and Dr. Strangelove when they came out, and I would experience movies like Dr. Zhivago in much the same way.   Now I have had forty years to experience relationships and emotions and I was very pleased to find Gone With the Wind extremely enjoyable in every way.  William Cameron Menzies' production design is magnificent, especially the extended scenes in silhouette or near-monochrome of deep reds and ochres, and the framing scenes of silhouetted figures beneath the reaching tree against a lurid sky tie the whole thing together in a remarkable fashion.  The production overall is truly outstanding, and one of the greatest products of studio filmmaking.  The story itself kept me riveted for nearly four hours (compared to being utterly weary and exasperated after an hour of Lebowski).  I was also very pleased with the sophisticated nuances of adult relationships, and most impressed with the character of Scarlett, one of the great monsters of the cinema.  Vain, greedy and stupid, she wavers only momentarily from her singleminded obsession with herself, and even then she is rapidly slapped back into form by the protective wall she forces others to build against her.  Where a lesser story might permit its protagonist to reach a breaking point and learn to become a better person, Scarlett never does.  She remains both pitiable and admirable to the end in her utter blindness to others' humanity, and especially her absolute lack of a sense of humor.  She is a pure sociopath and a brilliant creation, ugly inside and fantastically beautiful outside in the spectacular settings and luscious costumes.  Seeing Gone With the Wind again has been the most memorable and rewarding film experience I can recall for quite some time and of the three movies in this exercise it is the one I would gladly see again in a few years.

NEIGHBORHOOD

One of the blank-faced newer houses in the neighborhood, enlivened slightly by its vehicle.  Based on an image from my Zina minicam, a digital keychain camera which is impossible to aim accurately so it contributes to the composition.